Cate le Bon - Crab Day

This album buffets the listener about a tumultuous sea, which Cate le Bon tells us ‘mocks us with its magnitude’. The album is a bizarre holiday (not a holiday at all), a carnivalesque celebration of the coming of Crab Day – whatever that might be. We are greeted with the title track Crab Day: heavy beating guitar, a march, with interludes of the ghostly vocals we recognise from earlier albums (but a little less sweet). The piece moves in motions – the first three songs act as a surreal, manic-depressive exposition - we are invited in. “Sing your soul to me on Crab Day”. The next wave takes us deeper. We walk into Cate’s house in Find Me and I’m a Dirty Attic. It is filled with ghosts: “paint me in a picture with a new face, I’m a body of dreams.”  In We Might Revolve, we hear the post punk of prior albums. The ‘revolving’ of this song links back to the ‘rotation’ of the upbeat psych-folk single from earlier, Wonderful: the album is a see-saw. Yellow Blinds, Cream Shadows changes the colour pallet from haunted house to gentle sunrays. This and the following two songs lead us out of the house. The album ends with What’s Not Mine, which beautifully melds together the harmony and discord of the album.